Baby Blues Celebrates 10 Years!

﻿Baby Blues TV Series Highlights Friday Night Line-Up On The WB Set To Debut Friday, July 28 at 8:00 & 8:30 P.M.

New York, NY, July 11, 2000 — Baby Blues, the popular comic strip syndicated by King Features, has a lot to celebrate in its 10th anniversary year. The WB network is set to debut a new Baby Blues primetime animated comedy on July 28, the list of newspapers carrying Baby Blues has more than doubled since King Features “adopted” strip in 1995 and the 15th published anthology has just hit bookstore shelves.

The Baby Blues series on The WB expands the world of the award-winning comic strip by making it visible to millions of TV viewers across the country. The series offers stories for the whole family, exposing the humorous underbelly of suburban parenting. It will continue to be double-run from 8:00-9:00 p.m. ET for the rest of summer.

Susanne Daniels, President, Entertainment of The WB stated, “We believe Baby Blues is our best foot forward in animation to date. This is a project that we have nurtured for five years and the result is an extraordinarily funny and relatable series. It is clearly an eight o’clock show and until now we haven’t had any 8:00 p.m. slots available. Baby Blues is the perfect fit to help create momentum for our new Friday night lineup in the fall, anchored by ‘Sabrina, the Teenage Witch.’ If it is successful, as we expect, Baby Blues will be brought back for mid-season.”

Baby Blues has enchanted new parents, grandparents and kids alike since it first appeared on the comics pages in 1990 and has enjoyed tremendous success since joining King Features Syndicate in 1995. When creators Jerry Scott and Rick Kirkman brought Baby Blues to King, it appeared in about 250 newspapers. The strip now has approximately 62 million readers in more than 650 newspapers worldwide — more than double the amount of the original list of newspapers.

Contributing to the success of the comic strip are the 15 published Baby Blues anthologies, which have sold more than 800,000 copies. Lift and Separate: Baby Blues Scrapbook No. 12 (Andrews McMeel Publishing, April 2000) is the latest book to chronicle the adventures of America’s favorite first-time parents. The comic strip also received one of the cartooning industry’s most coveted awards. In 1995, the National Cartoonists Society recognized Baby Blues as “Best Comic Strip of the Year.”

Baby Blues creators Rick Kirkman and Jerry Scott met more than 20 years ago, they became friends and, eventually, working partners. When they first discussed doing a comic strip about parenthood, Kirkman, at least, knew what he was talking about. He and his wife had their first daughter in 1984, and in 1987 their second daughter was born. Scott, who had no children, thought what Kirkman was going through as a parent was very funny. So he decided to write about what he saw at the Kirkmans’ home — temper tantrums. Dirty diapers. Teething pains. When Rick added his superb artwork, “Baby Blues” was born.

Jerry Scott began cartooning professionally in the mid-1970s by submitting gag cartoons to magazines, then taking over writing and drawing on the Gumdrop and Nancy comics. Scott, a resident of Malibu, Calif., also co-created for the award-winning comic strip Zits. Kirkman began cartooning during kindergarten and continued in junior high where he sold Mad magazine parodies to his friends. His career has included being an art director for an advertising agency, and a free-lance designer and illustrator for major magazines. Kirkman lives in Phoenix.

King Features Syndicate, part of the Hearst Entertainment and Syndication Group, is the largest distributor of comic strips, panels and editorial features to newspapers worldwide. It is also a worldwide leader in merchandise licensing.